Setting up a collaborative environment

Alberto Cottica

D4SB Master Course

From opportunity assessment to business planning in social businessLesson 1

Why collaborate?

Katrinalist, 2005: results in days

Grobanites for Charity, 2005: 100% efficiency

Wikipedia, 2007: the largest encyclopedia ever written

There’s a new game in town

•hierarchy

•market

•mass collaboration

... a source of competitiveness for social business!

Tools: Google Apps

Tools: project management groupware-as-service

37 Signals Basecamp, and many others

Tools: Moodle

Media Wiki: Wikipedia’s skeletonTools: full-blown wiki

Wrong question.

Important dimensions of collaboration

structure scale command vs. consensus

What kind of collaboration?

Network of Paul Erdős’s co-authors (reduced)What kind of collaboration?

Network of health care lobbyists by degrees of separation from Obama (bottom left) and Bush (top right), 2009

What kind of collaboration?

Participation pyramids: why scale is important.

Optimistic? Pessimistic?

Case study: EC research proposal

• writing a bid for a European Commission research project

• a charismatic, hard working leader with a tendency to micromanagement

• initially about 10 collaborators, to scale to about 30

• collaborators to revise, comment and edit drafts produced by the leaders

• a three-month working period

•the core: Google Doc (wiki functionalities, word processor look-and-feel)

•coordination: Google Groups (mailing list, doubles up as a forum)•the social arrangement: the leader writes a draft, then he shares. Others can comment, edit, fill in the blanks.

Solution: Google Docs + Google Groups

EC research proposal: the outcome

• successful collaboration: recognized value added

• team building

• the scope for collaboration expanded along the way

• more comments than edits, unclear permission structure

Case study: peer-to-peer business plans

• getting creatives to help each other in developing business plans

• scalable community: starts at 0, up to 1000s of participants

• labour of love

• trust issues between Govt and creatives

Solution: a multichannel environment

blogsocial

network

secondlife

physical meetups

Peer-to-peer business plans: the outcome

• many cool projects launched

• high user satisfaction

• 2/3 of interaction is peer-to-peer

• emergent uses, lots of alliances

• proprietary, rigid platform starts to feel too narrow

• Ministry bureaucracy stifling lightweight hiring

Assignment

• design a collaborative system for students and faculty of this course to organize course material and produce a shared knowledge base

• interpret network shape, scale and command vs. consent of the intended collaboration

• choose a tool based on your interpretation